"El
Mercurio" is the most important paper in Chile. It does not mean,
however, that is the most reliable. There is famous saying in Chile "El
Mercurio miente" ("The Mercurio tells lies").

Mercurio
23rd of November of 1975, is a song I wrote in Glasgow during the
1970s and it is about a confrontation between members of the Gallardo
family and others and members of the Armed Forces. The story about lies,
because the confrontation never took place, appeared in Chile in the right-wing
newspaper: "El Mercurio" on the above date.

The newspaper's owner Agustin Edwards played a villainous role in our
country during the 1970s. It is known that Edwards met Henry Kissinger
and CIA Richard Helm to seek help about how to prevent, the Socialist
Salvador Allende, to take up his mandate. It is also known that the paper
received CIA money to destabilise the socialist Government of Salvador
Allende.
During the Pinochet's dictatorship the paper was seen as acting on their
behalf by misinforming its readers. Many Chileans pay dearly for it and
among them: the Gallardo family and others.

Click HERE
to watch (in Spanish - en castellano) "El Diario de Agustin":
a recent awards winning documentary made in 2008 in Chile about the controversial
Agustin Edwards and his newspaper.

Letter
from Isabel Gallardo to Sr. Ricardo Núñez

Isabel
Gallardo is an aunt of Alberto Gallardo. The letter below, written by
Isabel, reveals publicly her indignation to the suggestion made, by some
members of the present democratic government of La Concertación,
that the victims were guilty and that the victim's relatives were seeking
revenge.

Isabel
asked Mr Vidal, a Government minister, if to ask for justice was to seek
vengeance. Isabel had five members of her family assassinated by agents
of the Pinochet's regime. The accused are: Marcelo Moren Brito, Francisco
Ferrer Lima, Miguel Krassnoff Marchenko, Manuel Contreras Sepúlveda,
Ernesto Baeza Michelsen. Isabel said that these people never had the decency
of apologising for what they have done to her family and others.

Isabel
old mother met Baeza once and he suggested to her mother that she was
insane and that her children and husband never existed.

I
was living in Glasgow when I learned something terrible. A friend sent
me from Paris the pro-Pinochet newspaper El Mercurio. I began to read
it eagerly and in one of its pages I found something that interested me
very much. I read that a group of "extremists" had been killed
by the Army at Maipu in the periphery of Santiago. In the group mentioned,
to my astonishment, there were a number of people from our barrios and
members of La JOC. (Juventud Obrera Católica) The group mentioned
included my good friend Catalina Gallardo, her father Alberto Recaredo
and her brother's wife, Monica
Pacheco (in centre with skirt) who was three months pregnant. Their
detention took place on the 18th of November of 1975 and their assassination
took place the day after. In a separate incident, Catalina's brother Roberto
Gallardo and husband of Monica had been killed by the Army on the 17th
of November of 1975. I found it bizarre that my friends were called "extremists"
by The Mercurio. In any case if the new was true the so called "extremists"
were fighting for freedom suppressed by the Armed Forces led by Augusto
Pinochet who showed to have little respect for human dignity, our democratic
tradition and our constitution. Soon I learned the truth about their death:
A Chilean refugee living in Edinburgh, who had been held prisoner at the
notorious Villa Grimaldi, told me that my friends had been taken, by force,
to the area of Maipu but not before they had been tortured and killed
at Villa Grimaldi. My friends, therefore, never had any armed encounter
with the Army Forces at Maipu. Everything had been fabricated and the
Mercurio, a CIA backed newspaper, was at hand to distortion reality. This
horrendous news makes me feel sick and fills me with anxiety and anger
for El Mercurio, the Chilean Army, the police and Pinochet. The National
Truth and Reconciliation Commission known as the Rettig
Commission in Chile: "came to the conclusion that all these people
listed above were executed by DINA agents in violation of their human
rights".

Dr
Sheila Cassidy, the English doctor detained and tortured at Villa
Grimaldi in 1975 for assisting an injured opponent of the Pinochet regime,
speaks about this horrendous crime in her book Audacity to Believe. (There
is available a statement, submitted in evidence by Dr Cassidy to the United
Nations, 20 January 1976, in which she relates in detail her experiences
at the hands of Pinochet's agents from -DINA). On the 20th of October
of 1976 Rolando Rodriguez Cordero and Mauricio Jean Carrasco were also
killed by Pinochet's men. Rolando, a friend of mine since my childhood,
was the husband of Catalina Gallardo, killed in 1975. I also knew Mauricio
as a gentle person. According to the Rettig Commission, Mauricio and Rolando
were sitting on a bench on the sidewalk when a convoy of vehicles stopped
in front of them and a man got out of a car and without saying a word
opened fire on them. One was killed instantly, and the other was left
wounded and died later "the commission has drawn enough evidence
to come to the conviction that these two men were executed by government
agents in violation of their human rights". I have fond memories
of all these people as wonderful and generous human beings who gave me
a lot in terms of friendship and political awareness. When I left Chile
in 1974, I took with me a bunch of photographs showing my JOC
friends among them Rolando, Catalina, and Monica with happy smiles
on their faces as if to say, we are all enjoying life.